Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of doing business providing litigation services and in particular to a method of doing business preparing multimedia presentations scripts by providing a virtual scripting room allowing a plurality of remotely located participants to contribute concurrently to the presentation script.
Description of the Prior Art
To prepare a multimedia presentation, the sources (individuals or documents) must be in the same physical location as the scripting technician (the “Scripting Room”). Within the context of a lawsuit, for example (and as shown in FIG. 1), a trial consultant or technician (“Operator” or controller), meets with one or more attorneys, witnesses and/or experts (“Clients” or contributors) in the Scripting Room and together they utilize multimedia software to create a scripted presentation (a “Script”) of evidence relating to a specific witness or the opening/closing of a trial. Software for creating such a scripted presentation is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,473,744, which is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference. As an alternative, the Clients may provide the Operator an outline of an examination, opening statement, or closing statement.
In the Scripting Room, the Operator creates a script corresponding to the outline. A physical scripting room as currently utilized in the art may include Clients 11 and 12 working with an Operator 10 (trial consultant or technician) to script a multimedia presentation. The Operator utilizes multimedia software and data source material on a CPU 14 and associated display monitor 15, which the Clients (and the Operator) view on a large screen display 16 linked to the Operator's CPU.
Regardless of how the Script is initiated, the Clients and the Operator still must physically meet to review the Script and work together in the Scripting Room to make final revisions to the Script. This entails synchronizing the schedules of potentially a large number of persons, and will typically involve the additional expense and effort of travel.